Greg,
"Nine ballplayers on the field" was just a baseball analogy. If I
recall correctly we have something on the order of 100 who
participate at least occasionally, and only Jim Gillogly knows how
many we have subscribed. (I hope it's a lot!)
> (snip) isolating a part of the
> effort in proprietary
> technologies is, in my opinion, the wrong way to go.
That is the struggle indeed. So many technologies are designed to
create finalized presentations and preserve their format across
platforms, but few of these seem to work for "works in progress".
What I'm trying to get at is a format where one only has to look
up the ascii or unicode equivalent to make changes, without having
to memorize yet another transcription scheme. There just doesn't
seem to be a single technology that incorporates all my desired
features (particularly direct editing and font imbedding) and
cross-platforms at the same time.
> Now, having said that, the Word idea does have
> advantages, particularly in
> the early stages when the transcription is being
> bounced around and
> corrected. But before plunging in you need to think
> about how to make this
> accessible to as many people as possible.
I had thought about making the proof-copies available in word, pdf
and jpeg, but I also need to consider webspace for each additional
format. These combined would occupy around 180mb, with at least
another 60mb for each additional format. Word and pdf offer the
best viewing resolution, at least on my system, but jpeg offers
the widest access. PDF is not directly editable through a viewer,
but does have one of the widest used viewers for end-product.
XML and web-based SQL are options to also be considered,
especially for web access. Setting up a MySQL database is simple,
but it would take some time to write and test the front-end
scripts necessary to make this directly accessible and editable.
SQL does have the advantage of allowing everyone to view the
changes and corrections made by others, something unavailable in
Word, at least in a web context. This may ultimately prove to be
the most flexible of alternatives for the proofing stage.
> There is also free software
> for collaborative web
> pages (once discussed on-list). We need to agree on a
> technology that will
> bring the effort to the widest number of people.
> Perhaps we could run a
> test? Distribute one or two pages and see if all those
> interested can
> handle it?
I've been trying to locate and read documentation on several of
the collaborative technologies, and so far each has it's strengths
and drawbacks. I agree that we need to do some research and
testing. As much as I'm anxious to get on with this, I agree that
a little planning and testing will make this a much better effort.
The first stage is for me to set up a pre-release version of the
font, along with an associations index. I've only been adding
glyphs when I encounter them, but there are a few I can readily
add before releasing a beta-copy. I'll work on a few test pages
in various formats, but I can already say that TeX is beyond the
present time allotted in my learning curve. Someone else might
give this a try?
GC